Jimmy Wales has predicted the failure of MySpace (NWS-A) within the next few years, saying that the advertising "hurts my eyes."
He added that "There's way too much advertising and they're not really respecting their own community."
The problem I have with Wales comments are that he doesn't define failure. Does he mean failure in the sense of Wikipedia is a non-profit entity and doesn't like that MySpace isn't? Although Wales has started his own for-profit business lately.
Saying it will fail without defining failure is unfortunately meaningless. Saying that all the advertising "hurts his eyes" is meaningless as well.
If all he's saying is that he doesn't like how the site is being monetized, well, that's his personal opinion. But in truth, nobody has really tried anything like MySpace where they're taking an existing community of this scale and trying to make money with it.
The other part of the problem with the comment be Wales is that there is a huge difference between a non-profit, private and publicly held company. For a publicly held company like News Corp., which owns MySpace, they are legally required to make attempts at monetizing their businesses. They can't just stop the effort. If they did, they'd find themselves with lawsuits and attempts at throwing people out of the business. It's an entirely different world than Wales has ever lived in.
Google (GOOG) will sooner or later face this with YouTube. Shareholders will eventually demand that the investment in YouTube begin to bring them returns. That's simply how the world of publicly owned companies works.
If he thinks that MySpace will fail because of advertising on it, that will have to be proven. Maybe Wikipedia is becoming less visited and talked about in the news, and this is simply a way to get some free marketing for the site. Not a bad idea really. After all, we're talking about it here because he said what he said.
MySpace failing is just wishful thinking on his part, in my estimation. What he doesn't like is that a business model is being attempted that he doesn't agree with, so he responded how he did. The truth is that it's possibly Wales and Wikipedia that may eventually have financial problems as the cost of keeping it going increases.
» Is MySpace being too Cautious? from TheAlphaMarketer
A recent post we talked about Jimmy Wales prediction that MySpace (NWS-A)would fail within a few years, although he didn't give any definition of failure, it seems it's because of it offering too much advertising in his opinion.From a... [Read More]
Tracked on: April 21, 2007 9:29 PM | Permalink to Trackback